Joe Mcdonnell
Software Engineer at Oracle
San Francisco Bay Area United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolJoe Mcdonnell is a software engineer with nine years of experience building and scaling high-performance data systems, currently working on Apache Impala at Cloudera. He previously spent a decade at Oracle as a Principal Member of Technical Staff where he designed and shipped workload management features for Oracle Database Resource Manager and scaled consolidation support to thousands of databases. Joe brings deep expertise in performance profiling, testing, and production-grade deployment, and has applied those skills to debug and optimize Impala’s ORC/Parquet handling, cache eviction, and concurrency-sensitive test infrastructure. He combines strong systems-level coding with data-focused academic training in statistics and machine learning from the University of Chicago and a CS degree from Caltech. Based in the San Francisco Bay Area, he also mentors peers and coordinates cross-platform optimizations, showing a knack for turning complex requirements into reliable, scalable implementations. An under-the-radar strength is his track record of addressing elusive edge cases in storage and compression layers that directly improve real-world cluster stability and throughput.
9 years of coding experience
California Institute of TechnologyStatistics, Machine Learning, Statistics, Machine Learning at The University of ChicagoComputer Science, Computer Science at Stanford Center for Professional Development
Github Skills (12)
parquet10
c-language10
imp10
cprogramming-language10
impala10
performance-tuning9
caching9
hdfs8
debug8
debugging8
test-automation7
hive7
Programming languages (4)
Github contributions (5)
apache/impala
Dec 2017 - Nov 2022
Apache Impala
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:273 commits in 4 years 11 months
Contributions summary:Joe's contributions primarily involved debugging and improving the performance of the Apache Impala project. They addressed issues in data loading, particularly for ORC format, and optimized the handling of result set metadata. Their work also included correcting edge cases in the LIRS cache eviction algorithm and ensuring the correct handling of compression codecs for Parquet files. Additionally, they modified core testing infrastructure to prevent problems due to concurrency or file locking issues.
apache-impalaparquetolapsqlapache
joemcdonnell/native-toolchain
Jun 2018 - Sep 2022
Contributions:2 pushes, 2 branches in 4 years 3 months
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